The WD Black SN770 is on offer among the oncoming hordes of Memorial Day PC gaming sales. Right now, that makes it one of the best value drives around. It's already a great drive, picking up the silver badge position in our best SSD for gaming guide.
If you're looking to bolster your gaming rig's storage for just $210 for the 2TB model, you could do a lot, lot worse than treat yourself to one of these capacious drives. 2TB will give you plenty of room for Windows and a good chunk of your gaming library, without having to resort to spinning hard drives.
The SN770 is also one of the newest drives on the block and comes supporting the latest PCIe 4.0 interface and packing the very latest tech. A quick look at the throughput figures may have you scratching your head though, as the SN770 tops out at 5,150MB/s, while the fastest drives are hitting over 7,300MB/s.
This is because the SN770 is a DRAM-less drive, which means it uses a portion of your system memory for the mapping instead of using dedicated memory on the SSD itself.
The reason to do this is to reduce costs, and with a well-engineered controller, the impact on real-world performance can be minimal. And that's absolutely the case with the SN770, which may be notably off the pace when it comes to the peak synthetic throughput, but is a solid performer when it comes to the real-world, capable of beating what should be faster drives when it comes to file copying and game loading—the stuff that actually matters to the vast majority of gamers.
That said, you can essentially ignore the technicalities of how this drive works, and just enjoy a speedy slice of next-gen storage for less. $60 less than the already generous MSRP in fact.
If your budget won't quite extend to the 2TB model, then the 1TB drive is worth considering as well, as that's down to $102 at the moment as well. You won't get quite as many games on this smaller model, but there's no difference in the performance.
